Critical mass

The only prominent item on the enormous glass coffee table at the editor’s house was Joan Didion’s then-latest novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Kael asked the host what he thought of it. "The editor reached for the novel, held it up as if it had healing properties, and pronounced: 'It’s full of resonance.'" Wolcott adds: "I didn’t dare exchange glances with Pauline, for whom Didion was full of something, but it sure wasn’t resonance."

Kael, who died in 2001, had a simmering rivalry with Didion that occasionally came to a boil, as Nathan Heller notes in The New Yorker. Like all rivalries, it no doubt owed something to what the two had in common. David Kipen once said, “The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.” Kael and Didion both went to Berkeley (Kael didn’t graduate) and shook off sexism and East Coast bias to gain mountaintop perches in the literary-journalistic landscape. It’s not hard to imagine why they would have spent some time playing compare-and-contrast.

The Paulette issue isn't so much about imitation (theirs) as cultivation (hers). Kael was famous for seeking out young writers. She'd give out her phone number, offer invitations to join her at screenings, even help find them jobs. If you were the recipient of one of these unsolicited calls, it seemed like an act of astonishing kindness and concern. Others might equally well see it as claque-building.

For whatever it's worth, the most gobsmacked I've ever been in a fairly gobsmack-prone life was when a colleague in the Globe library told me one day that I had a phone call from Pauline. This was 1983. I'd reviewed her compilation of capsule reviews, "5001 Nights at the Movies," for the Globe that Sunday. "What have you been reading?" she asked. I haltingly got out the title ofIrving Howe's forthcoming memoirs, "A Margin of Hope." "Oh, the excerpt in the Times Magazine looked pretty dull. What did you think?" What did I think? What did I think? I was 25 and worked in the Boston Globe library as a data-base manager (don't ask). Who cared what I thought? Apparently, Pauline Kael did. Intoxicating as her writing was, the realization that the woman behind that style cared was a lot more intoxicating. A lot more.

This comes amid a review of Tower Heist and Melancholia, and while the first is perfect in-bed, at-home, only-while-extremely-ill viewing, I can't imagine seeing Melancholia anywhere but in a theater. In part, that just has to do with size and projection: you can't possibly appreciate the first five or ten astounding minutes on the small screen. (The following 5004238 minutes, though, you probably could.)

I'm trying to think of a sensitive way to ask about playing all these sexualised children, but fail miserably. "Were you aware that you were a paedophile's dream?" I blurt out. She nods. "Yeah!" She giggles, perhaps a little uncomfortably. "It was weird, and it dictated a lot of my choices afterwards 'cos it scared me." How did she become aware of it? "When you're a little kid you get really excited about it and you think being famous is pretty cool, and you get a fan letter and you read it, and then I'd be, like, 'Eeeeeugh!' Terrified." What did the letters say? "You can imagine. I stopped reading them obviously, but it made me really reluctant to do sexy stuff, especially when I was young."

Of Beautiful Girls, she said: "It definitely made me shy away from that kind of role. And there's a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one."

She's right, of course. Marty calls herself "an old soul", but she could only be a fiction, this girl so wise and funny. It's only the knowledge that she could never be real that makes the scenes she shares with Willie bearable, let alone as touching as they are. Take the beautifully acted moment when she suggests to Willie they could be girlfriend and boyfriend, and for the merest moment he allows himself to think of it.

Can you sum up what the movie is about for you?My work is never only about the story—it is always about what is inside the people who are in the story. But, in the most basic sense, it's about time: getting through it, minute by minute, stopping it, and the end of it, death.

You’ve said that The Future is your version of a horror movie. Can you explain why?The character I play in the movie fails to make the dance she sets out to make, and then flees her life. She moves to a world where she will never have to try and fail again. No one cares if she's creative there. This is a sort of horror movie for a person like me, who has created her sense of self through making things. But it's also a fantasy: a fear-fantasy.

Let's close with some bad bitches, shall we? First up, because it makes me so so happy: I SAW THAT watches The Hunger.

So it turns out David Bowie is just the latest of Deneuve’s long-term lovers. She turned him into a vampire in the 18th century and they’ve been having a grand old time, but now suddenly he’s aging. Aging!! And really quickly! AMAZING MAKEUP EFFECTS! He demands to know what became of all her other lovers, who he refers to somewhat disturbingly by name, like, who are all these vampires and where are they now? And how old is this Deneuve person, if she’s had all these lovers who all lived hundreds of years? (We briefly see later an image of her in ancient Egypt, so, there’s that) She says all her lovers had the same thing happen to them–suddenly they started aging, and couldn’t sleep, and she doesn’t know why. Bowie understandably seems to think she should have told him about this before vamping him out back in pre-revolutionary France or whatever. She doesn’t seem too concerned–she mostly just leaves him alone in the house, apparently hoping he will finish aging and dying so she can get on with her life. He querulously asks her who she’s going to replace him with and she won’t tell him. THEY SMOKE.

We have also met a very young Susan Sarandon who has the most badass haircut ever. She’s a doctor, working on the secrets of aging. She and her team have this emo monkey in a cage who ages 100 years in five minutes and then turns into a skeleton and then crumbles into dust right there on the VHS tape while they all smoke intensely and watch. Sarandon goes on TV to talk about aging, and poor aging David Bowie sees her and tries to go get her help. Instead she calls him a “crank” and abandons him in the waiting room for hours, during which time he ages roughly 500 years. Then he’s like “You disappointed me” and she’s like “WHAT, YOU GOT SO OLD, WAIT DON’T LEAVE” but he does. When she follows him to his house, Catherine Deneuve tells her he went to Switzerland.

So then check this out. Bowie is now indescribably ancient and stumbling around, and Deneuve is kind of grossed out and sad. He begs her to kill him, to “release” him, and suddenly she tells him that she can’t. That the flip side of their gift of eternal (or at least, very long) life is that they actually can not ever die. That their bodies might wither all the way to dust but still they’d be there, conscious, watching, feeling, within “the rotting wood” of the coffin. He’s so ancient and gnarled and mummified and shrunken that she carries him like a baby up into the aforementioned dove-filled attic, and puts him in a box she has waiting there, and then the camera pulls out and we see a huge stack of those boxes. And she puts her hand on one of them and is like “Alexander, Cynthia, this is John. I love him, as I love you. Be kind to him tonight, my loves,” etc.

Sadness is not only an affect we experience; it is also a label is ascribed to us, or that we ascribe to others. In English, to call someone 'a sad case' is not compassionate but derisive; it means they are pathetic, hopeless. In a forgotten, early 'cultural studies' essay of 1960, the windy, conservative American poet Randall Jarrell evoked "a sad heart at the supermarket": "It is a standard joke of our culture that when a woman is bored or sad she buys something to make herself feel better; but in this respect we are all women together, and can hear complacently the reminder of how feminine this consumer-world of ours is".

Comments

The only prominent item on the enormous glass coffee table at the editor’s house was Joan Didion’s then-latest novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Kael asked the host what he thought of it. "The editor reached for the novel, held it up as if it had healing properties, and pronounced: 'It’s full of resonance.'" Wolcott adds: "I didn’t dare exchange glances with Pauline, for whom Didion was full of something, but it sure wasn’t resonance."

Kael, who died in 2001, had a simmering rivalry with Didion that occasionally came to a boil, as Nathan Heller notes in The New Yorker. Like all rivalries, it no doubt owed something to what the two had in common. David Kipen once said, “The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.” Kael and Didion both went to Berkeley (Kael didn’t graduate) and shook off sexism and East Coast bias to gain mountaintop perches in the literary-journalistic landscape. It’s not hard to imagine why they would have spent some time playing compare-and-contrast.

The Paulette issue isn't so much about imitation (theirs) as cultivation (hers). Kael was famous for seeking out young writers. She'd give out her phone number, offer invitations to join her at screenings, even help find them jobs. If you were the recipient of one of these unsolicited calls, it seemed like an act of astonishing kindness and concern. Others might equally well see it as claque-building.

For whatever it's worth, the most gobsmacked I've ever been in a fairly gobsmack-prone life was when a colleague in the Globe library told me one day that I had a phone call from Pauline. This was 1983. I'd reviewed her compilation of capsule reviews, "5001 Nights at the Movies," for the Globe that Sunday. "What have you been reading?" she asked. I haltingly got out the title ofIrving Howe's forthcoming memoirs, "A Margin of Hope." "Oh, the excerpt in the Times Magazine looked pretty dull. What did you think?" What did I think? What did I think? I was 25 and worked in the Boston Globe library as a data-base manager (don't ask). Who cared what I thought? Apparently, Pauline Kael did. Intoxicating as her writing was, the realization that the woman behind that style cared was a lot more intoxicating. A lot more.

This comes amid a review of Tower Heist and Melancholia, and while the first is perfect in-bed, at-home, only-while-extremely-ill viewing, I can't imagine seeing Melancholia anywhere but in a theater. In part, that just has to do with size and projection: you can't possibly appreciate the first five or ten astounding minutes on the small screen. (The following 5004238 minutes, though, you probably could.)

I'm trying to think of a sensitive way to ask about playing all these sexualised children, but fail miserably. "Were you aware that you were a paedophile's dream?" I blurt out. She nods. "Yeah!" She giggles, perhaps a little uncomfortably. "It was weird, and it dictated a lot of my choices afterwards 'cos it scared me." How did she become aware of it? "When you're a little kid you get really excited about it and you think being famous is pretty cool, and you get a fan letter and you read it, and then I'd be, like, 'Eeeeeugh!' Terrified." What did the letters say? "You can imagine. I stopped reading them obviously, but it made me really reluctant to do sexy stuff, especially when I was young."

Of Beautiful Girls, she said: "It definitely made me shy away from that kind of role. And there's a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one."

She's right, of course. Marty calls herself "an old soul", but she could only be a fiction, this girl so wise and funny. It's only the knowledge that she could never be real that makes the scenes she shares with Willie bearable, let alone as touching as they are. Take the beautifully acted moment when she suggests to Willie they could be girlfriend and boyfriend, and for the merest moment he allows himself to think of it.

Can you sum up what the movie is about for you?My work is never only about the story—it is always about what is inside the people who are in the story. But, in the most basic sense, it's about time: getting through it, minute by minute, stopping it, and the end of it, death.

You’ve said that The Future is your version of a horror movie. Can you explain why?The character I play in the movie fails to make the dance she sets out to make, and then flees her life. She moves to a world where she will never have to try and fail again. No one cares if she's creative there. This is a sort of horror movie for a person like me, who has created her sense of self through making things. But it's also a fantasy: a fear-fantasy.

Let's close with some bad bitches, shall we? First up, because it makes me so so happy: I SAW THAT watches The Hunger.

So it turns out David Bowie is just the latest of Deneuve’s long-term lovers. She turned him into a vampire in the 18th century and they’ve been having a grand old time, but now suddenly he’s aging. Aging!! And really quickly! AMAZING MAKEUP EFFECTS! He demands to know what became of all her other lovers, who he refers to somewhat disturbingly by name, like, who are all these vampires and where are they now? And how old is this Deneuve person, if she’s had all these lovers who all lived hundreds of years? (We briefly see later an image of her in ancient Egypt, so, there’s that) She says all her lovers had the same thing happen to them–suddenly they started aging, and couldn’t sleep, and she doesn’t know why. Bowie understandably seems to think she should have told him about this before vamping him out back in pre-revolutionary France or whatever. She doesn’t seem too concerned–she mostly just leaves him alone in the house, apparently hoping he will finish aging and dying so she can get on with her life. He querulously asks her who she’s going to replace him with and she won’t tell him. THEY SMOKE.

We have also met a very young Susan Sarandon who has the most badass haircut ever. She’s a doctor, working on the secrets of aging. She and her team have this emo monkey in a cage who ages 100 years in five minutes and then turns into a skeleton and then crumbles into dust right there on the VHS tape while they all smoke intensely and watch. Sarandon goes on TV to talk about aging, and poor aging David Bowie sees her and tries to go get her help. Instead she calls him a “crank” and abandons him in the waiting room for hours, during which time he ages roughly 500 years. Then he’s like “You disappointed me” and she’s like “WHAT, YOU GOT SO OLD, WAIT DON’T LEAVE” but he does. When she follows him to his house, Catherine Deneuve tells her he went to Switzerland.

So then check this out. Bowie is now indescribably ancient and stumbling around, and Deneuve is kind of grossed out and sad. He begs her to kill him, to “release” him, and suddenly she tells him that she can’t. That the flip side of their gift of eternal (or at least, very long) life is that they actually can not ever die. That their bodies might wither all the way to dust but still they’d be there, conscious, watching, feeling, within “the rotting wood” of the coffin. He’s so ancient and gnarled and mummified and shrunken that she carries him like a baby up into the aforementioned dove-filled attic, and puts him in a box she has waiting there, and then the camera pulls out and we see a huge stack of those boxes. And she puts her hand on one of them and is like “Alexander, Cynthia, this is John. I love him, as I love you. Be kind to him tonight, my loves,” etc.

Sadness is not only an affect we experience; it is also a label is ascribed to us, or that we ascribe to others. In English, to call someone 'a sad case' is not compassionate but derisive; it means they are pathetic, hopeless. In a forgotten, early 'cultural studies' essay of 1960, the windy, conservative American poet Randall Jarrell evoked "a sad heart at the supermarket": "It is a standard joke of our culture that when a woman is bored or sad she buys something to make herself feel better; but in this respect we are all women together, and can hear complacently the reminder of how feminine this consumer-world of ours is".